


Inductance

by TwoBrokenMirrors



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Being Hunted, Being Trapped, Being generally traumatised, Blood, Gen, I love my friend's character so I break him, Near Drowning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 19:41:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5714809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwoBrokenMirrors/pseuds/TwoBrokenMirrors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tahir finds out exactly what it means to be a wild Jaeger.<br/>Basically, there is no backup.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inductance

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Atmospheric Electricity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4676600) by [adiduck (book_people)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/book_people/pseuds/adiduck). 



> I wrote this for [adiduck](http://archiveofourown.org/users/book_people/pseuds/adiduck), since it turns out that if you befriend someone with a series as good as her heterodyne!Sorin fanfanfic and get to know all of her wonderful Guard jaegers, you end up really wanting to work out what exactly gives one of them PTSD and then lovingly describe it in prose.  
> Or maybe that's just me?

The little town was nothing much to speak of, labouring with the difficulties of living in the middle of the forest miles from anywhere, small and somehow hunched under the incipient winter weather. It was no great place to be foraging for what you could steal, but Tahir was lacking in money, lacking in cold-weather clothing, and lacking in ideas.

He'd been lurking around for a few days since finding the place, scavenging food from rubbish heaps, every now and then raiding a chicken coop or a sheep-pen or a clothesline. He'd been pretty sneaky! Hardly anyone had seen him or anything, and he'd only played one or two _very sneaky_ little jokes, like putting someone's underwear on a goat. That had been _hilarious._

But it was getting boring here now, and he'd filled his pack back up with food he was fairly certain would keep, so it was most definitely time to leave. It would have been more fun if a few of his brothers had been around, but... well. Probably better not to think about that.

 _At least hy vould haff been varm eef ve set de plece on fire,_ he mused, bouncing idly on his paws as he headed deeper into the trees. There had been a sharp frost that morning, and the ground was iron-hard.

Which is partly why it was so very surprising when it gave way beneath him.

He fell with a yelp, a flurry of dirt and dead leaves falling with him a surprisingly long way, until landing brought a ripping, agonising pain in his leg and shoulder. Hissing sharply, he clapped a hand to his shoulder and found the rough point of a crudely-made wooden stake thrusting through his flesh.

He stopped, and laughed to himself a little.

He hadn't just fallen down a rabbit hole or something, had he? He'd fallen into a _trap_. Someone had dug a pit and lined it with spikes, and he'd been dumb enough to come hopping right along and fall in.

For a moment he wondered what they had been _aiming_ to catch, but decided it was probably more important to get himself out. Biting his lip, he eased the stake out of his shoulder; that was going to be a bother until it closed up, but at least the one that had got his leg had only driven a furrow through the side of his thigh. He tested it cautiously and determined it would still take his weight, if he limped a bit for a while.

More dirt pattered around him. Maybe the edges of the pit were giving way- that'd make it tricky to climb out. He looked up.

Several faces looked back at him from above.

He paused, then grinned and waved his good arm.

“Ho, fellas! Hyu vanna help a guy out?”

One or two of the faces jerked backwards out of view, as though they hadn't expected him to speak. The others glanced at each other, and then also moved away.

“Vell dat's rude ov hyu,” Tahir observed, as he shifted to find a way to get up that wouldn't lead to further impalement. “Hy hope hyu've gone to git me a rope or somtink, boyz-”

A shovelful of soil landed directly on his head. Spluttering, he collapsed back down, his shoulder protesting violently.

“Vot de-”

Another load. And then another, and more, as though they were shovelling as fast as they possibly could... to fill the hole.

They were burying him.

“HOY!” he yelled, scrambling to get back to his feet, clawing at the wall of the pit to find a handhold. “VEN HY GIT MY HENDS ON HYU-”

A stone missed his head by centimetres. Another bounced off his hat. He snarled, wishing he had space to jump, he'd show them what happened to people who tried to bury Jaegers alive-

There was a gritty, grinding noise and the light was all at once cut off. Startled, he slid to the bottom again, just barely missing the nearest stake, and stared upwards.  
Burying him had been too slow, apparently. That was, if he was not very much mistaken, a rock.

He sat in the dark, and felt... strange.

He'd recognised a few of those faces. There had been the town's grocer, from whom he'd pinched one or two bits. There had been the owner of the unfortunate goat, and also the owner of the equally unfortunate underwear. He'd seen them as harmless, hapless, frankly lacking in senses of humour... and now they were trying to kill him.

And they were succeeding.

And he was all alone. No brothers, no Masters, nobody to notice he was gone and come to get him. Nobody but himself to wreak revenge. The usual blithe confidence that of course he could get out of here and inflict due punishment, even if he did have to do it solo, warred with the sick tension gripping his chest, and... lost.

He couldn't breathe. His shoulder and leg burned red-hot; he found himself pawing at them, trying to work out if they were healing, please say they were healing, he needed them, he needed them to get _out of here_ -

He needed to get out of here.

Launching himself at the wall, he clawed with frantic energy at the frozen soil, ignoring the pain from his shoulder wound, ignoring the dirt that coated his face and filled his mouth and eyes and weighed down his ears. Roots snarled in his claws, stones and pebbles scraped and bruised as he gradually forced himself into the wall, kicking and straining to get further, to dig faster. Even with a Jager's strength, the sheer freezing solidity of the ground made his muscles ache within a few minutes. But he did not stop, could not stop, and the moment his claws broke the surface and reached up into free, clear air was the sweetest he had experienced in a long time.

Hauling himself out fully, he lay spread-eagled on the forest floor, chest heaving, fingers still crooked and clawing instinctively at the leafmould. It seemed to take much longer than it should have to regain breath, but as soon as he could feel energy seeping back into his limbs he was up, staggering, trying to get his bearings.

The village was in... he blinked, tried to scrub his vision clear, twisted an ear heavy with clods of mud to try and listen. There. That direction. Which meant... he swivelled, almost fell as he forgot his wounded leg, caught himself and set off in the opposite direction in a hasty, dragging limp.

He just needed somewhere to lie low until he healed. A cave. A hole- his mind shied away from that idea as soon as it arose, and he whined. Not a hole. Definitely not a hole. But _somewhere_. Surely there would be _somewhere_ ; it already felt like he had walked quite long enough-

He could hear barking. The excited, baying barks of dogs on a scent, and the shouting of their handlers. For a second, he wondered what they could be hunting.

In the next second, he took off running.

It should have been easy to outrun them. It should have been the simplest thing in the world. But as trees arose in front of him and forced him to jink on a leg that could barely take his weight, as undergrowth snatched at his paws and hid dips that jarred and threw him, as the gathering evening gloom blurred his mud-smeared vision even further, the sound of the dogs grew ever closer.

He shut his eyes as he ran and prayed- to the Masters who had up and vanished on him, to the Allah of his childhood whom he had long since turned his own back on- that at least he'd have the strength to take a couple of them with him when he went.

And then the world turned upside-down.

The ground disappeared from under his next step and he lurched forwards, hunching and tucking as best he could as he bounced and rolled and splashed without ceremony into deep, fast, and _freezing_ water.

On instinct he gasped for air, inhaled the wrong element, choked and thrashed until he could force his head above the surface and remember how to keep himself afloat. The river swirled him in its current; floating ice and debris spun with him, obstacles that seemed to interfere at every turn with his attempts to strike out for shore. His legs were numb, his arms even more so; he could feel the chill seeping to the very core of him.

He laughed, a shrill and hysterical sound that took almost the last of his breath. Escape the dogs only to die of hypothermia or drown? He had not signed up for _this._

Except, of course, he had. Wild Jaegers were the walking dead, and every one of them knew it.

Something bumped him in the back of the head, hard enough to make him see stars.

He struck out at it, a half-hearted rebuke against an inanimate object, and his sluggish hand flopped against a sizeable tree-branch.

The last remnants of sense and thought spurred him to grab, squeeze the last strength he could out of his fingers, and haul himself in a flurry of spray and kicking until his torso at least was draped across it.

The branch, far more sunken that it had been, bobbed and drifted in a lazy circle and then set off once again downstream. Its passenger sobbed, both for air and for himself, and tried his best to stay awake.

After a while, the branch and its cargo found themselves cast up against a gently shelving muddy beach- which, to Tahir's barely-present consciousness, was as close to solid ground as made no odds. With aching, painful, over-careful movements, he disentangled himself from his makeshift raft and dragged his protesting body up onto the shore proper, where a sprawling willow tree provided something akin to shelter. In the gap between two roots, curled as tight as he could manage, he felt exhaustion wash over him and pull him downwards.

Part of him wondered if, if he did sleep, he would wake up. The rest of him could not find the energy to care.

_Hy'm sorry, Master Villiam. Master Barry. Hy'm sorry, brodders. Hy'm... sorry...._

Tahir slept.


End file.
